i'm feeling boaty

The weirdest thing

Yes, its another pregnancy post. I promise Ill think of something else to write about at some point, theres just not much else on my brain this week.

The weirdest thing about this whole having a baby thing is not, as I expected it to be, the idea of actually having the baby (call me naive, but while Im doing lots of preparing for it, I do tend to think that my body knows what its doing. It managed to get a baby up there and grow it successfully thus far. The baby has to come out somehow. And so it will). The weird bit is the being a parent thing that comes after.

It struck me, the manifestation of the weird thing, while buying a second hand plate for toast and stuff at a car boot sale. Someday I thought Someone will say I used to eat toast off that plate, referring to their childhood. It might be Someones Favourite Plate. The only plate they will eat off. Or the plate they want to take away with them when they move out of home.

The things I buy for around the house now, because they are just things that we happen to need, or I happen to like, or match something else that I have… theyre not only part of my life: theyre dressing the set for someone elses childhood. It makes everything I pick up feel different. I look at things in my hand that Im about to buy and realise that one day, they might form a major part of someones first memory. And thats only the kitchen cleavers. Im kidding.

Its also the knives.

No, Im still kidding.

But then I start to expand that thought process to everything else. Every decision I take, the child will imagine is being made from place of infallible parent-ness, I presume. And I know now that it wont be. It will just be me, or My Beloved, or both of us at once, making decisions in the same chaotic way that we always do. They will just be the thing that we end up doing or where well go on holiday as its cheap and available with only a weeks planning or the way that Christmas has panned out this year. And yet to someone else, these will appear to be actual well-thought-through decisions that are real, and parenty, and thus unquestionable.

I find this hilarious.

Its not that therell be someone else always around. That much Im getting used to, with the idea that we will suddenly not just mean My Beloved and I , or even Me, My Beloved and the cats, it will simply mean Me, My Beloved and Doozer (and the cats) instead.

Its the fact that to Doozer, we will be parents. We will be the ultimate grown-ups.

Little does Doozer know that were not really grown-ups at all.

Were just the future-nostalgia caretakers. Buyers of toast plates. Curators of made-up Christmas traditions.

And we just happen to be those parent things at the same time.

At least, thats what the official line is.

A nurse who hadnt asked My Beloved his name the other day referred to him with great familiarity and only mild officiousness as Daddy all the way through the appointment. Is Daddy comfortable?, Can I get Daddy a glass of water?, Bye now, Daddy!

That is the second most weird thing about being pregnant. Random women start referring to your partner as Daddy in public, and you dont say a word. I have a feeling that after that experience, he might say it is the weirdest.